Entries in MemberDesk
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It was 5 months ago on January 14th when I posted Let's Get This Party Started, AZ Disruptors' first post announcing our Software Incubator and the construction of an additional 6,000 sq ft space adjacent to Axosoft's offices bringing our total office space to more than 12,000 sq ft.

In those 5 months, we've finished the construction of the new office space, hosted a number of lunch events, talked at numerous local tech gatherings, exposed a local tech company accused of text message scams and brought together 15 great local tech startups for the AZ Disruptors Pitch Day.

The Pitch Day proved to be a huge success. In front of a packed house full of angels, entrepreneurs and techies, each of the 15 startups showed their stuff. There was quite a bit of surprise in the room as to the quality of the companies that were presenting. Most people didn't think such companies existed in Arizona.

We plan to change that perspective. There is a tremendous amount of great talent here. All they need is the support systems to help make software startups more successful.

Of the group of 15 startups that pitched, we are excited to announce two that will be joining the AZ Disruptors incubator:

Blogic.com - Blogic is a blogging engine for companies that already have a web site and want to add a blog that matches their current web site design. Users can provide Blogic with the URL to their current web site and Blogic will magically create a blog that mimics the look, feel and navigation of their existing site within seconds. There is a real need out there for such a service. We currently have this problem for both of our companies, Axosoft and TransferBigFiles.com. Adding a blog that looks like your existing site can be a huge pain and we think Blogic is going to be in high demand once it makes its service public. Right now, they are taking email addresses for those who want to be first to take advantage of the private beta when that becomes available. When blogic presented at the Pitch Day, the tentative name was Nounc'd.

MemberDesk - Provides simple web site creation for anyone wanting to sell monthly subscriptions of content such as eBooks, video, newsletters, etc. The software makes the management of such a web site and the collection of recurring monthly subscriptions super easy. MemberDesk already has a V1 product with dozens of paying customers, which is a fantastic place to start. We think the demand for this type of service is going to continue to raise as more and more content providers want to have subscription based revenue streams for their services (rather than one-time payments). MemberDesk is already signing up customers.

Some of you might be asking "what happened to having 5 startups in the incubator?" The answer to that is a combination of factors which included:

Lack of readiness to commit full-time

The need for at least one technical co-founder

Poor timing for some of the startups

Of our final 15 pitches (remember, we started with 58 applicants), we liked and approached 7 startups: MemberDesk, Blogic, ScratchAudio, EventDay, Convrrt, NextSlide and GiveTheOK. We still think these 7 companies have tremendous potential. Obviously, we are super excited about the two we brought into the AZ Disruptors incubator, but we'd also like to support the others and give them the props they deserve.

Over the next several months, we expect to have more lunch events and we will soon open up applications for our second class of AZ Disruptor companies. In fact, we've put together a promo video this time:

Thanks to everyone who's helped us get this far. This has truly been a community effort! A special thanks to our judges for Pitch Day: Francine Hardaway, Greg Head, Jim Goulka, Mike Wolf and Steve Zylstra. They took time out of their busy schedule to help get the ball rolling on building a stronger startup community in Arizona.